Tag: Fail to Succeed

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Finally…Moving the Needle

Photo: mpaiav/Pixabay

Finally moving toward what you alway thought ‘you should be doing’ and seeing the first little signs that things are going the direction you wanted them to go is one of the most exhilarating feelings on the planet. What is it that has lived in your mind, in your fantasies, in your ‘dream come true’ file, as being the thing you were born to do, but somehow hadn’t managed to get there? Writing a novel? Being an actor? Finishing that degree? We all have things like this that we feel so passionate about, especially when we are young and see the world as full of endless possibility, and we sometimes act on them, learning new skills, getting in shape, practicing the scales, and putting effort into becoming better at them. As we grow older, and begin to face the failures that life needs us to experience, not simply to fail for failure’s sake, but to learn that a particular way of doing something may not be the best way for us to do it. Then pivoting and finding another way to do something.  While some have dreamed of a life as a concert pianist, and through hard work, bring their skill levels to their highest personal level, only to realize at some point that while they are exceptionally good, their skill may not take them to a higher level, allowing them to be the concert pianist they dreamed of being. A version of the old saying of ‘all dressed up with nowhere to go,’ comes to mind. What now? Perhaps the discipline learned at the keyboard, along with their love of the music itself can still be a large part of their life, but in a different way. A very famous actor, with many awards for his acting was in this exact situation, realizing that his skill were not going to take him to the world’s stages as a pianist, so he pivoted to acting, throwing himself into learning from the best, using the discipline he had developed as a musician in a new field, and becoming one of the best there. And he still plays the piano and enjoys being able to play some of the most phenomenal compositions written.

While the above story about the pianist-turned-actor is wonderful to hear, what did it actually take to make that turn, and face an uncertain future in a new field? In this, there are feeling of loss, thoughts of wrong choices, perhaps overestimating what was possible, but facing the need to change how we are doing things, and taking action to make our lives better. As with all loss, there needs to be grieving for the loss: the loss of a dream we once pursued. A dream we needed to pursue, because it gave us new tools, focus, and the ability to communicate in a particular way, and most of all, the confidence that we can become very skilled at one thing, but through life-circumstances, realize we need to let go of the result we were seeking in the first place. In the case of the pianist, he developed his skill to the top of his ability, and kept the confidence that becoming extremely good at something brings with it. While realizing that making a living as a pianist was not to be his future, he was able to more quickly pivot to another way of entertaining people with his physical skills, this time as other characters. We are all able to do this by remembering the times we accomplished something difficult, and we enjoyed the journey to its accomplishment, as opposed to focusing on the end goal, and taking that into each situation life presents us. Whether it is a new job, needing to learn something quickly to keep pace with life—new parents know this well!—or doing something for the simple pleasure it brings to us is the path we can follow. 

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Action and Momentum

Taking action to create something new, be it a new sport, a new job, or a painting, is one of the biggest steps we can take as human beings. We all know people who are incessantly starting something new, learning new skills, making new friends, seeking new horizons, and there is something enviable about them in many ways. They have moved beyond the ‘wouldn’t it be nice…’ stage of dreaming of a better way to live by putting their dreams in action. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes not. And they don’t seem to care either way. For many of us, trying something new, finding it’s not something we particularly like, and then abandoning it, is seen as failure, but that’s not true. As Thomas Edison said, ‘I have not failed. I have successfully discovered twelve hundred ideas that don’t work.’ By flipping the ‘failure’ paradigm this way, the work put into discovery—even unsuccessfully—is work that will guide us to a better way of doing something.

Taking steps to write a song, or a story, or perhaps to paint a picture, we enlist our unconscious mind, and suddenly we begin to think of new and different ways to create. Some work. Many do not. But all of them are teaching us discernment—what to leave in and what to take out—and we are able to make progress and take those lessons into the next idea that crosses our mind. The momentum we created pulls us along and the work itself becomes more exciting each time we come back to it. We may not finish this particular painting or story at the time, but what we have learned from its creation will go with us into the next project, and help inform our decisions in bringing something else to life. Even if we are only baking pre-prepared slice-off cookies, the very act of creating something is invigorating, and triggers so many positive things within us. Not taking any kind of action to fulfill a dream, or even just to bake cookies, leaves us feeling flat, as if we are procrastinating and letting life pass us by, rather than taking life’s hand and agreeing to dance, even if, especially if, we don’t know the dance steps. It’s more exhilarating to feel the rush of wind as your boat speeds down the river than it is to remain sitting on the dock. There is a time and a place for contemplation, perhaps while sitting on the dock, and there is a time to move, to act. We need both in our lives, each activity aiding the other: those hours of thought and reflection help us define what we want to do, before we begin to move toward it. It is the silence and contemplation that gives birth to the first step of a journey, the first few words of a story, or the opening bars of a song, that once begun, eventually take lives of their own, and we become passengers of our creation that is now fully-fledged and will show us the next steps to take in our quest.

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One Step Back

When we think of our lives, we tend to remember the wonderful times first: when we succeeded, when we felt loved, when we felt happiness. We tend to put the tougher times, when we failed, or felt lost, into the back of our mind and sometimes have trouble remembering the details of those events. In the long game, though, we fly and we fall at different times, and these are just steps we take on our journey. Because we tend to be hardwired for ‘good’ things, we tend to look at our failures, however large or small they may be, as bad things. The reality of a journey, however, is that a step backward is simply that: ONE step backward. That step back does not erase all of the steps we too forward to reach our current destination.

To keep perspective on this idea, think of learning to read and to write. When we first look at a printed page, it may look like a series of black dots and lines, but as we begin to learn the alphabet, we begin to see a particular order. We may not yet understand that order, or how to interpret it, but we needed to see those black lines and dots in order to reach the next step of seeing the individual letters as well as how they are grouped to form words. From the recognition of individual words, comes the cognizance of seeing them arranged in ideas and thoughts, which is the stage that we begin to actually read what was heretofore a mystery to us. Along that simplified passage, we come across things that confuse us, that we mispronounce as we read aloud, that we don’t understand, and these, too, are just steps forward.

What we forget as adults, as we become more knowledgeable, is that each step has been accomplished as just one part of a larger task, and that as we go forward, if we need to take a step back, that it does not erase all the forward steps we took to reach that point. As adults, we tend to look at learning as something we did in our past, and now that we are grown-up, we should already know this. Which begs the question of why should we know this? Anyone who has been taught to read as a teenager or an adult can identify with the struggle to learn to read; for them, however, this is a passage into living a fully functioning life that is truly new to them. They knew they might have trouble learning this, and knew they had to work hard to learn this new skill. It is the mindset of someone who knows what they know, but more importantly, knows what they don’t know, and that it may not be easy. They don’t see a step back—to learn past or future tense, for example—as something bad, but as yet another step taken to better understanding.

We all continue to learn new things as we progress through life, be it academic, athletic, artistic, and simply letting go of the idea of ‘at my age, I should know this…,’ will open us up to many new things that bring us to new levels of understanding. Even for those things we already know, new insight and awareness come with seeing things from a different perspective.